With just five and a half million people spread out over more than 100 million square miles of land — and a nationalized system pledged to provide high-quality free medical care to them all — the nation of Finland is about as perfect a testbed for connected health innovation as you can imagine. Add in a surplus of developers left over from Nokia’s mobile phone heyday, and you have a country with the means, motive and opportunity to jump into digital health with both feet.
Tag Archives: MobileHealthNews
Report: VA turns to Apple to develop patient-facing mobile EHR
When Apple launched Apple Health Records, a feature that lets users upload their health records from participating health systems onto their phone, in the spring, it sparked conversations about consumers’ access to health records and the entrance of major tech companies into the healthcare space.
Now the Department of Veterans Affairs is in talks with the Silicon Valley tech giant about the creation of a portable EHR specifically for veterans, the Wall Street Journal reports. According to the WSJ, who reviewed emails and spoke with unnamed sources about the initiative, what’s currently on the table is a new Apple software that would let the VA patients enrolled in the system transfer their records to their iPhone — a functionality that would likely be achieved via a version of Apple’s Health Records app.
Amazon’s newest machine learning product makes sense of unstructured medical text
Amazon Web Services has unveiled a new machine learning tool that looks to help healthcare industry developers process bodies of unstructured medical text.
Called Amazon Comprehend Medical, the HIPAA-eligible service is able to pull out medically-relevant information such as patient diagnoses, symptoms, medical test details, treatments and dosages, while simultaneously highlighting any protected health information.
Amazon, Berkshire, JPMorgan Chase partner to build healthcare company with focus on tech
Amazon, the world’s ubiquitous online store, revealed today it is collaborating with Warren Buffet, who heads Berkshire Hathaway, and the bank JPMorgan Chase to build an independent, nonprofit healthcare company with the goal of increasing user satisfaction and reducing costs.
Health Affairs: Telemedicine for mental health is fast growing, but inconsistent
A new report on telemental health in Health Affairs shows that, among rural Medicare beneficiaries, use of telemedicine for mental health is growing quickly but inconsistently across the population. The piece is meant to provide perspectives for legislatures as they consider increasing Medicare coverage of telemedicine.
Telemedicine enters the 2016 US presidential primaries
During a campaign stop in Iowa this week, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton touted the importance of telemedicine, Politico reported this morning. The entire speech is available from Clinton’s campaign, but here’s the relevant passage: